I had a tough time with this one. I couldn't get the loudness and power I wanted even though this is presented at -11.9 LUFS 4.6 LU which is loud for me. The BGVs were a nightmare.

Be that as it may, I humbly offer my take on this haunting ode. One thing I'm sure we all love is the singer's voice. The unique quality and soulfulness of it does not come around often. I'm not sure I captured it very well.

The Penniless Wild - Seat Back - Mix 3

Inspiration for this new approach was sparked on a ride home listening to a song on the radio which was heavily limited. It gave me the power I wanted without busting the level meter. This was mastered at -13.1 LUFS, 7.4 LU, which is significantly less than Mix 1's levels.

I also did some arrangement changes which I think enhanced the presentation.

The Penniless Wild - Seat Back - Mix 4

The BGVs in this were buggin' me man... So I copied and pasted two good ones and replicated them through the arrangement. That helped.

Fine-tuned the delay and echo character on the first guitar and lead vocal and polished up the over-drive phrases on the second guitar.

Nice dotted delay in the intro. 1/8 or 1/16? The lead vocals its saturated and brought to the front in a nice way. I like the stereo image you created of the second guitar. Did you used delayed copies of the track hard panned or a steroizer effect? I can hear you based the mix in a guitar centrist approach. Love the distorted lead part. Pretty cool taking it later to a chorused lead. I will like to hear the BGVocals more featured. The ska part its cool with the crunchy tone you achieved. I liked the mixed overall. Nice flanger at the end. My only comment will be the BGVox and the tom patterns on the drums are not emphasized and you could boost the emotional ride if you feature more these elements as they come in. I can tell you have a keen ear for guitar tones. Take care and great job.

(07-08-2019, 07:01 PM)javierpg84 Wrote: Nice dotted delay in the intro. 1/8 or 1/16? The lead vocals its saturated and brought to the front in a nice way. I like the stereo image you created of the second guitar. Did you used delayed copies of the track hard panned or a steroizer effect? I can hear you based the mix in a guitar centrist approach. Love the distorted lead part. Pretty cool taking it later to a chorused lead. I will like to hear the BGVocals more featured. The ska part its cool with the crunchy tone you achieved. I liked the mixed overall. Nice flanger at the end. My only comment will be the BGVox and the tom patterns on the drums are not emphasized and you could boost the emotional ride if you feature more these elements as they come in. I can tell you have a keen ear for guitar tones. Take care and great job.

Thanks for your comments.

The guitar intro is an 1/8th delay with what Presonus calls an Pingfactor offset of +4.2%. I was attempting to give it a shimmering effect. The second guitar is just a chorus set at 8.1 ms delay. The original signal is panned full right, the delayed signal, full left. This gives space in the middle for the vocal, 1st guitar and keyboard. I thought the second guitar, brought to the middle and re-amped for heavy drive was a nice compliment to the character of the vocalist and lent added interest to the arrangement. The only difference between the first phrase of it and the second is actually only level. I tried hard to give the guitars lots of character with as much melodic and rhythmic content as I could. As there were not a lot of parts to this composition, I felt that was very important to do.
You have a keen ear for BGVs, LOL. These were not particularly well performed and I think I was trying my best to hide them. Others have done a much better job having either melodyned them or cutting and pasting the phrases which stayed in tune. I did neither which is kind of a chicken thing to do. I have yet to spread my Melodyne wings. What I did do was copy each BGV track two times and pitched them up and down 1 cent respectively trying to blur them into tune. In that endeavor I failed.
Others too, have done a much better job on the toms and the definition of the space they inhabit. I am usually pretty good with drums but left this as they were to concentrate on other areas. My bad, there.